I make no secret that I’m a fan of PersonAccounts. I think they’re very handy when working with individuals instead of companies, and I really like pairing them with the Relationship Groups app to make households. I’ve always considered them as mostly-contacts. I put all Person fields on the Contact object, reserving very few for […]
Convert between Business and Person Accounts (B2B – B2C)
I’m a huge fan of Person Accounts (Salesforce’s phenomenal combination of Account and Contact that allows selling B2C–the best example I use is Land’s End, which sells to people). Orgs can use a hybrid model, allowing a company to track its, e.g. partner companies (B2B) and individual customers (B2C).
There is an interesting limitation to Person Accounts: They cannot be converted to B2B via the Salesforce front-end. The record type can only be changed via the API, using a tool like Data Loader or the Excel Connector.
I set out to create a tool that would use the API to convert the record type of a B2B to B2C and back.